'best-looking Champion'

JACK FLECK OF IOWA

The telephone had been ringing off the wall. Now it was an interviewer calling all the way from New York. Before she knew exactly what she was saying, Mrs. Jack Fleck had blurted: "He's the best-looking champion the Open has ever had. He's got beautiful, thick brown hair and green eyes and dimples—he looks just like Tyrone Power!" Such wifely exuberance would be deplored by most husbands, but if tall, slender, admittedly handsome Jack Fleck had been sitting in his Davenport, Iowa living room at the time, he wouldn't have made a point of it. For he is also, as all who know him agree, as composed, patient and good-natured a champion as ever came out of nowhere to win golf's greatest prize. A man had to be all those things to persist in the face of chronic failure as a contender on the winter and summer tournament circuits and be ready, confident and nerveless when the big chance came. The path that led him to San Francisco's Olympic Club began back in his home town of Davenport in 1936. The Western Open was held there that year and Jack Fleck not only had never seen a tournament before, he had never set foot on a golf course: "I snuck in with some other kids, but they chased us. But I saw enough to like what I saw." At 15, Jack started to caddy, and on Mondays he was allowed to play the course with his set of cast-off clubs. Before he had learned to break 80, he had taken a job as assistant pro, a club cleaner actually, at Des Moines. Then the war came and Jack eventually found himself in the Normandy invasion. After that, he decided that nothing that happened on a golf course could hold much terror for him. Home in Davenport, he got a city appointment as pro at two municipal golf shops, eight miles apart. Into one of these shops one day walked a girl, carrying a broken club to be mended. This was Lynn, now Mrs. Jack Fleck, who keeps the broken club on the mantel of the living room. They have a son, Craig, 4� years old. When Jack was off playing in the tournaments, Lynn minded the shops; she went to work at 5:30 on the very morning of the play-off. All that will be changed now; the big payoff is at hand. And how does the great day find Jack Fleck? This way: "I thank God for giving me the strength," he said as he received the championship trophy. "I thank my father and mother, my wife and my little boy."